Every time I take time off from the blog I always wonder if there will still be people reading it when I come back. Hopefully you, the dear readers are still out there. If so, here’s what I did over my 2018 summer vacation!

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I Cleaned My Bedroom

This may sound like an odd thing to do during a vacation, but when I’m blogging I don’t have a whole lot of free time and the last place that gets cleaned in my apartment is my bedroom, because if I have guests over, I can just shut the door and no one knows of the mess behind it. Well, the mess had grown to monumental proportions and sadly I forgot to take a “before” picture, but this kind of sums it up. It took one and a half days to get rid of all the trash and clean the room up. I do all my writing in here, so it’s nice to have it all spic and span again!

I Went To Louisville, Kentucky

I took a road trip to Louisville, Kentucky for a five day getaway in the middle of the month. I didn’t take a ton of pictures because I was on vacation after all, but here’s a small sampling.

I stayed at the Omni Hotel in downtown Louisville. This is a brand new hotel and it was really nice. It had a grocery store in it, gift shops, a swimming pool, two bars and a steak house restaurant. This is my room and of course when I was in it I kept the drapes shut to keep out that nasty sunshine! I did however take a couple shots of the view of downtown Louisville from my room.

One thing that bothered me was this photo that hung over the toilet. It was a little unsettling to be taking a piss with some guy staring at you with binoculars. I wanted to say, “C’mon, it’s not that small!”

One of the reasons I wanted to go to Louisville was that our family lived there for six years. We moved there when I was 5-years-old in 1963. This is our house and it hasn’t changed much except the trees are a lot bigger! That’s another picture beneath it and the other house photo on the right is the house where our friend Johnny Saag lived. That house brings back memories because that’s where I first heard the Beatles album Revolver back in 1966 when his sister let me, my brother Jim and Johnny listen to her copy when she played it with her friends.

The rest of the pictures in this block are photos of the grade school I went to, Holy Trinity. The school wasn’t in session, but there were women in the office and I told them I went to grade school here years ago and they were gracious enough to let me take a few photos in there. It was so weird, the classrooms kind of looked the same and I never liked school, so my stomach kind of went into a knot while walking around in there! The last photo is an inside joke. After all I was inside the school!

This set of photos are two shopping areas from my youth. The first is the Mall St. Matthews. This was built in 1962 and so when we moved there in 1963 it was brand new. I think it was one of the first malls in the country and we used to go there all the time. Myself and my brother Jim used to hang out in the record store which was located in the middle of the mall. Sadly that’s gone and none of it looked too familiar.

I did get a nice surprise in the strip mall that we used to go to a lot when I was a kid. That used to be called Brownsboro Shopping Center and we used to buy comic books at a drug store there called, Monen’s Drug Store. That’s now a consignment shop, but I couldn’t believe it when I saw that the barber shop was still there. That’s where we got our hair cut for six years while living in Louisville and it hasn’t changed one bit! I went in and asked an older barber if this is the original barber shop and he confirmed that it was! He said he had been cutting hair there since 1964! So the odds are that he had cut my hair! Pretty crazy stuff. I was tempted to complain that he took too much off of the top, but I let it go.

A friend of mine who I got to know way back in the crazy MySpace days lives in Louisville. And his name is Marty too! So on MySpace he was referred to as, “Louisville Marty” and I was “New York Marty!” He came out to New York once and we hung out for an afternoon, so it was great to have a reunion. I met him at the hotel bar, we went to dinner and then we had drinks at the bar in the legendary Seelbach Hotel. It was a classic bar and we had a fun evening! I hope to see you again soon, Marty, thanks for meeting up with me!

My cousin Susie and her husband, Chuck live a couple hours outside of Louisville and they generously offered to drive in to the city so we could have lunch, hang out and catch up! I haven’t seen them for a few years, so I was really looking forward to this. We met at the Louisville Slugger Museum and as you can see, this place is really batty! Oof, sorry, I couldn’t help that one! There’s Chuck and Susie and below that is a photo of the three of us where we had lunch, caught up and had a such a fun afternoon! I really want to thank both of them for coming in to see me, it was a highlight of the trip and I hope to see you both again soon!

That was my trip to Louisville. We moved from there in 1969 and came back here to Peoria and I only came back once in the mid ‘80’s to see a concert for a weekend, so it was cool to revisit my old whomping, stomping grounds!

I Worked On My Kitchen Collage

I spent some quality time working on my collage in my kitchen. I’m making some progress on it and I’m proud of it so far. Lots of pictures and words up there and sometimes to clear my mind or forget about stuff for a few minutes I go and stare at different parts of it. Hey...what’s that sticker in the corner...The Marty Monologues? What the fuck is that?

I Spent The Rest Of My Time Working On This

Once again...what the fuck? What could this be? Well it’s something I worked on all month and I’m still working on it. Is it a new blog? Maybe a podcast? A local comedy show on a cable network? Something that's going to happen at an open mic night at a bar? Maybe it’s just a figment of my over-active imagination—one thing is for sure, if you keep checking in to the blog, the answers will be reveled any day now. Stay tuned and we’ll see you all tomorrow!